Martin Fischer

Martin Fischer, born 1962, is a ChessBase staffer who, among other things, organizes and holds seminars throughout Europe and helps administer playchess.com. For ChessBase, he publishes a quarterly tactics booklet "Chess Problem — the enigmatic pages of Fritz". He lives in Hamburg and plays for the Chess Club Johanneum Eppendorf.

Recent news

3/11/2018 – Today, in the time of strong engines, analysing chess games seems to be easy: fire up the engine and let the computer work out the lines. This is useful but does not help your chess as much as analysing actively. ChessBase offers a lot features that help to analyse, from entering games to analysing professionally. | Drawing: ChessBase

3/7/2018 – New: Start a private tournament in your browser! Chess clubs, schools, companies, or any other collection of players, can also offer chess online — on their own chess server — for free! It is simple and does not does require much of any technical skill. In fact, all it takes are a few mouse clicks. It's a powerful and completely free self-service tournament system in your web browser! Here's how to get started in a few easy steps! | Photo: Hamburger Schachclub

3/2/2018 – Practicing openings is best done by playing openings. And with a Powerbook, Fritz 16 turns into an ideal sparring partner to play, test and practice openings. He plays the openings you want to practice again and again. When you are ready you can test your knowledge against human opponents!

2/21/2018 – Endgame training has the reputation of being dry and boring. But Fritz 16 can make it easy, playful, fun and effective. The following short tutorial shows you how to hone your endgame skills with Fritz. | Photo: ChessBase

2/12/2018 – If you write about chess in print or if you want to prepare printed training material you might want to insert diagrams into your text. With ChessBase 14 this is easy. In fact, there is more than one way to spice up your chess text with diagrams.

10/13/2017 – An introductory tutorial to using ChessBase 14, from our resident expert. Learn installation and activation, navigating the program, working with databases, entering games, training, the cool "assisted analysis" feature, how to use Fritz as a sparring partner effectively, advanced search functions, creating a custom repertoire against your next opponent, and using databases in the cloud! You'll want to bookmark this for future reference for sure!

8/7/2017 – With the latest update of playchess.com we reintroduced a powerful training tool: playing training games from a given position in the opening, in the middlegame or in the ending. Playing out certain positions can really improve your chess. Here is how to do it.

7/6/2016 – Since a few days a new "replayer" is used on the ChessBase websites. Of course, you can replay games with it but you can also add an engine to analyse the game and you can enter and analyse variations. In conjunction with the ChessBase Cloud the replayer also offers possibilities, which are particularly interesting for tournament organisers who want to share the games of their tournament. And that's how it's done...

3/1/2016 – In the second part of his interview with ChessBase, Leonardo Ljubicic, winner of the 28th World Championship in Correspondence Chess, speaks about time-trouble in correspondence chess, strong grandmasters in over-the-board chess who also excel in correspondence chess, the importance of opening preparation, and his chances against Magnus Carlsen in a correspondence match.

2/29/2016 – Correspondence chess is a challenge and offers the chance to explore chess in real depth. And modern correspondence chess is not a battle between engines but a battle in which humans use modern engines to play strong and correct chess. If you like to analyse deeply and if you like to search for the truth, then it might be time to try correspondence chess.

2/21/2016 – Leonardo Ljubicic is the 28th World Champion in Correspondence Chess. In an extensive interview he talks about his way to the title and reveals how he prepares for his games. He talks about his openings and what is important to play successful correspondence chess and explains how humans use engines to play better than engines - an art and a science.

2/18/2016 – Despite computers, engines, databases and critical voices - correspondence chess is very much alive. Of course computers have changed correspondence chess but to play it with success handling engines well is not enough. Leonardo Ljubicic knows what modern correspondence chess is about. He just won the 28th Correspondence World Championship with 10.0/16.

Fritz 16 is looking forward to playing with you, and you’re certain to have a great deal of fun with him too. Tense games and even well-fought victories await you with the “Easy play” and “Assisted analysis” modes.

88 times, IM Oliver Reeh leads you step by step through the most brillant game conclusions of the world champions - in interactive Fritztrainer format, enabling you to enter the winning moves yourself.

What is the trend in the London System? To play with or without Nf3? You can find the answers in the completely new powerbook - based on more than 187 000 games, most of them sourced in the engine room of playchess.